Another hardware announcement from the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas is Qualcomm announcing the Snapdragon 600 and 800 series processors.

The Snapdsragon 600 processor features a quad-core Krait 300 CPU running up to 1.9GHz, an Adreno 320 GU, LPDDR3 RAM, and around a 40% performance boost over the Snapdragon S4 Pro. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 is expected to start appearing in devices around Q2'2013.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 meanwhile is even more beefy with a quad-core Krait CPU running up to 2.3GHz per core, an Adreno 330 GPU, 2x32-bit LPDDR3 RAM at 800MHz, 4G LTE CAT 4, 802.11ac wireless, UltraHD "4K" video output support, HD audio, dual image signal processors, and an overall performance boost. While the Snapdragon 600 is said to be 40% faster than the Snapdragon S4 Pro, the Snapdragon 800 is supposed to be 75% faster. The Snapdragon 800 is expected to start appearing in devices by mid-2013.

The new Adreno 320 and 330 GPUs support OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenCL, and RenderScript Compute. The Adreno 320 is said to be 3x better than the current-generation A225 while the Adreno 330 is said to have 2x better compute performance over the Adreno 320.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

The mission at Phoronix since 2004 has centered around enriching the Linux hardware experience. In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also use our Amazon.com or NewEgg.com shopping links when making online purchases or contribute to Phoronix through a PayPal tip.